


All Things Are Well

by quodthey



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-11 23:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quodthey/pseuds/quodthey
Summary: Hal Jordan was coping. Really. He was fine.





	All Things Are Well

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains content some people may find **upsetting**. I am always willing to answer tumblr messages or emails asking for clarification or elaboration.
> 
> Thanks to audreycritter for cheering this on and for the beta!

“I am your only friend,” Sinestro told him, and the background shifted—the colours bled together and the landscape blurred and then he was in a car, and there was a sign ahead of him, and then Andy was yelling at him to slow down, to pull over but he _couldn’t_ and as the car spun out of control, he twisted and blinked and it was Coast City, gone, gone, all of it. All of it his fault, all of it blood on his hands, and he could feel the rage come over him again as everything went green and the screams that never ended and his hands were moving and his mouth was opening but it wasn’t his mouth and they weren’t his hands because he couldn’t do anything, _“Hal, please, please, don’t”_ —

When Hal woke up, he was shaking. In dark of the room, all he could see was the alarm on his bedside table blinking calmly at him, the light flashing red. 05:47. 

“For God’s sake,” he sighed to himself, and rolled over, but when he was still awake at 06:14 and all he could hear were the echoes of screams, he sat up and reached for the bottle and glass on the side of the table and poured himself a shot of vodka. The bottle was cold in his hand.

He focused on the smooth curve of the glass and the burn of the alcohol, and didn’t think about the silence in his apartment, or how loud his heart and his breathing were. He didn’t think about the screams he heard in the silence. For everything there was a time—a time for apologies, a time for graves. 

His apartment should be full of ghosts, but he had left them at their graves with their headstones and the tiny parts of him that were left after he cleaved himself away from—

After he cleaved himself away. What else was there for him to do?

Hal took a breath. Held it. Pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind, and got up to face the light of day. 

The face in the bathroom mirror was his, and he could touch it. 

It was odd, sometimes—remembering that. He put his hands out in front of him, and made fists. Relaxed them. Rolled his shoulders. Every movement was his own. 

He put his palms to his face and they were his own callused hands on his own face. Brown eyes—there was no green or yellow when he was awake, but he was convinced sometimes that he could feel it lurking, right below the surface. Like the weeds at the bottom of a lake, slick and winding—ready to tangle around his ankles and pull him down, trap him and drown him as he struggled for freedom. 

He turned away from the mirror and moved into his living room to work his way through some exercises. He forgot, sometimes, that he could move like this. There had been a time, not so very long ago, where Hal would wake in the morning and he wouldn’t have to remind himself of any of this, wouldn’t have to think about how to move. A time where he would roll out of bed and run for miles in the morning and go flying, and crack jokes, but he had spent so long locked away. Hal Jordan, reduced to a voice in his own mind. He didn’t know if he had any jokes left.

He wanted to smile, so he did. But he could feel that it didn’t reach his eyes and he didn’t know how to want that anymore. 

There was a flight at Ferris Air with his name on it this morning, though, and he didn’t know how not to want the sky, so he got ready and ignored the emptiness in his chest. Before he walked out the door, he slid his father’s jacket on, then poured himself two fingers of whisky and downed it. To settle his nerves. 

His hands stopped shaking. 

\--

It started like this:

The whisky burned on its way down, as it always did, as it always had, and he relished it for a moment—this sensation that was his, in this body that was his, and he couldn’t feel anything clawing its way into his brain and suffocating him in his own thoughts. He was himself and he could feel, and laugh, and joke, and what did it matter, really, that he didn’t particularly want to do any of those things? 

But he put a smile on his face because he could and a laugh in his voice because he could, and ordered another drink because he could, and next to him, Ollie laughed, loud and free and careless. 

“Christ,” he said. “It’s good to see you unwind for once, Hal. How long has it even been?” 

Hal looked down into the amber of his glass, swirled it around, and for a second he could have sworn on everything he had ever believed in that he saw yellow in it, like he saw in his dreams. “A _really_ long time,” he said. He drained the glass. 

“To victory!” Ollie cried, beer sloshing as he raised it unsteadily. 

“Victory,” Hal smiled. That’s what this was: everyday a victory. Another day to wake up and feel the freedom of the sunlight on his face and the wind in his hair and to do what he wanted. 

He went home that night on unsteady legs and when he slept, he didn’t dream, and it was good.

The next night, he didn’t go out with Ollie, or with Barry, or anyone who remembered who he used to be. 

He walked down to the liquor store, and chose some bottom shelf paint thinner. The guy serving him was so young Hal was surprised he was allowed in the place, but he handed over his money and got what he wanted.

“Have a good evening,” the kid told him. 

“Sure,” Hal said. “You, too.”

When he’d come back (because that was how they talked about it, his friends—when he came back, like he’d just been away on vacation) Barry had dragged him around until the apartment he had found was almost habitable. 

“Just a small one,” he’d said, pulling Hal toward a row of televisions. “You need some way of keeping up with the world.” 

So he got himself some liquor, and he fell onto the couch and switched the thing on, flicking through channels until he found something mindless. 

There was a classic sci-fi marathon, and he laughed to himself as he left it on. Giant ants scurried across the screen as he settled himself in for the evening. 

“Man,” he said to himself. “I wish it was as easy as that.”

He tried to imagine someone suggesting a movie about a Green Lantern’s life. _Space! Action! Drama!_ See new worlds, make new friends—then you get to destroy them all and yourself. 

A movie with Kilowog. He snorted. 

He didn’t bother getting himself a glass, just lay across the couch, feet up, and drank from the cool bottle. 

He fell asleep like that, television still blaring, and the old soundscapes would have been filtering into his dreams, if he had been able to dream.

When he woke in the morning, with an aching back and bleary eyes, he nearly tripped over the empty bottle before putting it aside. 

\--

“I’m fine,” he said to Carol one morning, phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder. “Just getting everything set up again. Do you know how much work it is to be alive again? Seriously, take my advice: never die. It’s the worst.” 

“I’ll take it under advisement,” she says, distracted. “Are you sure you don’t need a hand? It’s been… a while, since you were on Earth, long-term.” 

Hal closed a cupboard door, and the _bang_ echoed down the phone, the flicker of annoyance in his chest extinguished. “I can handle it,” he said lightly. “If I need anything, I’ll give you a heads up.” 

“If you’re sure,” she said, torn between concern and relief.

He looked behind him at the rest of his apartment, almost bare as it was, a new start, clean of anything. He pictured an evening with Carol and Tom, could see Ollie and Barry, crashing around in it. Friends tripping over carpets and banging legs against corner tables stained with coffee mug rings, offering advice on everything from what wifi option he should go for these days to what car he should get. Ollie would have a lot of opinions on that. 

He tried to remember the last time he used a car. The last time he was in one, not even the last time he was behind the wheel. Hal thought it might have been a green car. Maybe.

“I’m sure,” he said, and when they had said their goodbyes he put the phone away where it couldn't judge him and sat down on the couch he rescued from the dump, with his newspapers and laptop. He read, and then he read some more, and he found new screams for his dreams. 

\--

Time passed differently when you drank. Hal remembered that. The way he would count not by the hour on the clock but in drinks at the bar, and flights. What happened between the two didn’t matter. 

Maybe wasn’t that time really passed differently, even if it felt like it did. The way the hours dragged by so painfully slowly when his hands grew clammy and his heart raced, even as he grinned at Carol and played darts with the other pilots. Maybe it was that he couldn’t see what else there was when he couldn’t hold it in his hand and dull the ache in his chest, numb the messy swirl in his chest until it was one unidentifiable emotion that he could lock safely away. 

The bottle he reached for in the morning to kill the hangover, the highball he reached for for his nerves, the beers at Edwards after flights, when he could just begin to feel the thudding of his heart and the tightness in his chest. Stopping at the store on his way home. The kid’s name was Jake and he was an unfortunately baby-faced twenty four. He greeted Hal by name when he stopped in. 

It was almost funny how easy it was to fall back into habits he had thought long-broken. How easy it was to go from _for victory,_ to _oh, just the one_ , to _ah, why not have another_ and then, he was on the couch and the television was on at three in the morning, and he had a bottle of whisky because he finished the last bottle at lunch, and Hal didn’t go out drinking with his friends, because when you drink, you know who you are. 

Hal knew who he was. 

“Seriously, man, just come for the one,” Ollie said after one late meeting, shrugging on his jacket. “Oa’s going to claim you soon for God knows how long, you should at least enjoy a good Earth beer before you have to choke down whatever it is they have in space.” 

“They have a lot of things in space,” Hal laughed. “But sorry, got an early flight at Ferris. Have one for me, yeah?” 

“There’s always something now,” Ollie said. He shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing, buddy.” 

“Missing seeing Barry get shitfaced? Yeah, you have no idea what I’d give for that.” A grin at that, wide and open and only slightly mocking as only friends can be, but his stomach roiled because it always came to this: An offer, an excuse, a joke. 

But Ollie frowned a little, smile dropping off his face. He leaned in to Hal’s space, guided them both to an alcove. 

Hal’s stomach twisted again at that expression. 

“Look, Hal,” he said, and if he were anyone else Hal would have said he was hesitant. “I was wondering.”

“Wondering?” Hal repeated. 

“If you’re okay,” Ollie asked. His eyes were soft and sympathetic and in that moment Hal hated him. 

“Well, Ollie,” Hal said, calm mask descending over the rage that was rising in him.. “I honestly couldn’t say. How long do I get to be _not okay_ before it’s a problem for you—maybe a week for everyone I killed? Or is that too much time, do you think? Maybe we should take a vote on it. Give me a second, yeah?” he drawled. “I’ll just get the rest of the League here so you can tell me how long it’s meant to take me to get over being possessed.” 

“Did you hear me say that?” Ollie snapped. “That’s not what I said. That’s not the conversation we’re having.” 

“Then what is it?” Hal snarled. His hands curled into fists in his jacket pockets. 

“This,” Ollie said quietly. “This is the talk where I ask you if you’re drinking.” 

“If I’m—if _I’m drinking_?” Hal laughed, shocked and furious. “Are you fucking serious right now?” 

Ollie grabbed him, which was how Hal realised how close he’d gotten. Ollie’s fingers curled around Hal’s lapels before he abruptly let him go and exhaled. 

“You don’t look so great these days, buddy,” he said. His shoulders slumped under the weight of having to deal with Hal and he could see the echoes of a hundred people in that slump. People had looked like that a lot around him, for a long time. “You sleeping at all?” 

“I’m fine.” He stepped back. There were only a few steps between the two of them now but to Hal it was like Ollie was on an island out in the middle of the ocean and all Hal had to reach him was a rowboat missing half its planks and a shattered oar. 

Here was another thing about when you drink: you turned into a goddamn liar. He should write a book. _How To Avoid Your Friends And Drive Everyone Away_ : a memoir by Captain Harold Jordan. 

“I’m fine,” he repeated, but no matter how many times he said it, the waves of the ocean didn’t recede. They lapped at his toes until he turned away, and he could hear Ollie call after him but he didn’t turn back. 

\--

When he got home, he poured a drink. There was Chinese in his fridge so he ate it before it started to go really bad, and then he had another drink. 

It was another evening. It was fine. 

There was nothing he could stand on the television, so he switched it off and turned his attention to his laptop, and he read insipid internet arguments and drank until the words blurred so much it was incomprehensible, like a language from the other side of the sector. 

But when he stood to try and make it anywhere near his bed, he tripped over the cord, and the whole thing crashed to the ground, and then he stumbled over that because he couldn’t control where his legs were going. The next thing he knew he was curled up, head in his hands and stomach in his throat and he was trying not to throw up everything but his head was spinning too much for him to sit up and make it safely to the bathroom and when he moved the entire Earth shifted beneath him and that was the end of that effort. 

From his position prone on the floor, he could see what remained of his laptop: screen cracked, bent too far back to be part of the design. 

Hal wished this was the worst evening he’d had this year. Even the worst evening he’d had this month. He thought about Ollie asking about his drinking. About his sleeping. He looked down at his shirt and the vomit on him and the floor and the laptop, and he tried not to hate himself but he couldn’t remember what that was like, so instead he miserably pulled himself up, stripped, and crashed into his bed.

When he woke in the morning, eyes opening carefully against the sun, he reached for the bottle on the floor next to his bed. He didn’t remember when he put it there, but it was there, so he drank it. 

He rolled out of bed and stretched, worked his muscles through exercises until he had another reason for trembling. But he felt disgusting; the stink from the drink and vomit and sweat mingling into a wretched experience. In the shower, the pounding of the water did nothing for him, and he leaned against the cool tiles and tried to dig up clear memories of what it was like to be a sober human. He had more than a few. More than ten years’ worth. But he couldn’t fit them into the shape of who he was now, the pieces of the puzzle mismatching and uncomfortable. 

He peeled himself off the wall and turned off the water, long after it had turned cold. 

The sun was warm on his face when he made it outside, jacket open and ring on. That was all he needed to be Hal Jordan: the open sky and the willpower to meet it. 

He raised a hand to his eyes as he looked up into the blue sky. “In brightest day,” he smiled to himself, and between one blink of an eye and the next, his uniform was on. This was what he needed. This was all there was. As long as he could fly, it didn’t matter what else happened. So he took to the skies, and ordered his stomach to obey him, and his mind to stay focused.

Him and the sky. That was all he needed. 

\--

Hal Jordan had many problems in his life, but there were two that were immediate concerns. He didn’t know the landscape below. That was a problem. His ring, not close to full power to begin with, was losing charge. That was another problem. 

And there was the last problem: a plane soared by as he was headed for the ground, and the distraction of it shook him for a split second, but a split second was all it took. The construct of his uniform wavered, and the green light of his ring faded to the dimmest glow, and Hal didn’t even have a split second to think _Oh, shit_ , before he was in his street clothes, in freefall, with only hard ground and a river beneath him. 

In the time it took to crash, he prayed that the ring wouldn’t let him die. 

When he landed, the shock of it froze him and the water gushed up his nose and stung his eyes; he tried to breathe but all he got was more water in his lungs, choking him, and he spluttered. He wanted to check the Lantern’s rings for magic again because life saving wishes weren’t supposed to come true just because you wanted it, but he couldn’t do much more than try to gasp for breath. As the current dragged him down, he writhed and felt for something to hold on to—and then, blinding pain as he crashed 

There was a time, a while ago on Oa, when another Lantern had taken a mallet to his face during training. His head hurt worse than that. He twisted in the water and his leg screamed at him, agony ripping from hip to ankle. His ribs were aching, back seizing. The ring might have stopped him from becoming a Hal-shaped pancake, but it didn’t do much more than that.

Maybe this was what he deserved. Maybe he didn’t get to have the sky anymore. 

Gritting his teeth and pretending his body didn’t exist, Hal reached out and made a grab for a rock in the river before he could be driven away from it by the current. Water was turning red around him. That was nice. A good break from all the clear blue. He still couldn’t breathe. His stomach was halfway down the river, along with what must have been most of the skin off his leg. 

His head was foggy. That familiar curl of cold iron inside him, settling in the pit of his stomach. The pounding in his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe. 

God, he wanted to never feel this. God. He wanted a drink. 

But he couldn’t because aside from being in a river, he was in the middle of nowhere, with no ring, no plane, no car. There was one thing there that he could change, though, and he shifted his grasp on the rock, angling himself toward the riverbank before pushing off. He choked down on the pain, and swam hard, and then—yes, there. Dirt under his nails had never felt so good, and Hal hauled himself up out of the river and collapsed onto the compacted ground. 

“Oh, God,” he moaned, flat on his back. He stared up at the cliff face hanging over the river. “Oh, fuck me.” 

\--

At times like this Hal appreciated Bruce Wayne’s tendency toward over-preparation. The man probably wouldn’t know how to take a joke to save his life, Hal thought, but if anyone was going to survive the end of the world, it’d be Bats. 

That was to say, Hal himself might have crashed and burned, but the League transmitter Batman had designed was still in perfect condition. Maybe it was magic. Hal didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything so long as he could eventually stand and get out of here.

He looked down at his leg, and then considered the area. Worked through different plans about how he’d get back to civilization, who would be able to help him. Superman was off-world. He remembered that. They’d mentioned it at the last meeting. Which meant—oh. Oh, great. There was only one real choice for rescue. 

He hopped over to the sheer cliff face to lean against it as he fiddled with dials and buttons. 

“Batman?” he croaked. “Batman. It’s Green Lantern.” 

They never had long to wait for a response from Batman. 

“This is Batman.” 

Relief, Hal discovered, was like someone hauling a fifty ton weight off your chest, only to replace it with twenty tons when you remembered you had more to do. “Okay,” he coughed. “So. Here’s the thing.”

“Lantern.” 

“I might be, uh. In a bit of a jam. A slight pickle. A problem. There’s a problem.” His mouth was moving but it was someone else saying the words and he wanted them to stop. 

There was a long silence from the transmitter. “Batman?” he called. His voice wobbled embarrassingly and he closed his eyes as if that would stop him imagining future meetings sitting opposite Batman’s perfectly impassive face as the other man remembered the time Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, nearly burst into tears over the transmitter at him because he got a bit lost. 

“What happened,” Batman said, because Batman never asked anyone anything. “Where are you.” 

“That’s, uh, that’s part of the problem I’m having,” he said. “There’s a chance, a small chance, that maybe I don’t… exactly know.” 

“What. Happened.” 

“An accident,” Hal snapped, then groaned when he moved and remembered that his ribs existed. “My ring’s dead. I just need a lift.” 

Another silence. Hal hated those fucking silences. In his head he saw the slow downward curve of Batman’s mouth, the way his jaw set. He was carved out of marble and every inch of it was anger. “I’m tracking your transmitter,” he said eventually.

“Okay,” he said.

“I will be there shortly.” 

“Okay,” he said again, weakly. For years he had left the Tower or the field as soon as he could so he wouldn’t have to deal with the fragile mortality that affected the humans on the team who weren’t Batman. So much for that. “See you soon, buddy.” 

There was no response. Typical. 

\--

The plane landed not too far away from where he was trying not to burn to death, so he hauled himself up and, one arm wrapped around his ribs, started to limp his way to where rescue was. Every part of his body screamed in protest, so instead he stopped, and leaned back against the rock, because this was fine. It was a nice day. He wasn’t dead. He didn’t need to worry. 

“Hey,” he smiled. “How’s it going?” 

Batman stared at him. Hal could feel blood trickling down the side of his face but getting Batman to admit to a weakness was like getting blood from a stone, and Hal refused to be seen as weak, so he ignored it. 

He shifted, but his leg quivered, muscle and bone declaring a mutiny against him, so he moved back to the other leg, smile firmly in place even as he wanted to vomit. He didn’t think he could, though. A silver lining. 

“What happened,” Batman said as he advanced, and now Hal was faced with the solid wall of him, steady and implacable. 

“An accident,” he said. Batman didn’t budge. 

“You’re bleeding,” he said. 

Hal glared at him. “Not a total fucking moron,” he said. “I have eyes. And also, I can feel things.”

He took another step forward and his half-mangled leg gave way beneath him. But he didn’t meet the ground, one strong hand wrapped around his bicep holding him tight. 

“Hal,” Bruce said—and it was Bruce in that voice, not the Batman. His mouth was a thin flat line, and Hal couldn’t see most of his face, but the soft tone ripped into him. 

Hal looked away. “I’m fine,” he said, voice steady. “It looks a lot worse than it is, believe me.” 

Bruce said nothing and Hal shifted a little in his grasp. 

“Seriously,” he said. “I’ve had bruised ribs before, it’s not a big deal.” He didn’t look at Bruce, but he could hear the soft breathing. 

“Hmm,” he said. “And the leg?” 

There was a planet Hal had been on, once. Only once. One of their prisoners had been convicted of treason and Hal had had to watch, helpless, as they boiled the man alive. His skin had sloughed off, peeling away from his bones under the heat of the water. Hal watched as he died. He had begged for mercy after he learned what the punishment was, had tried to get someone to intervene. But in the end, Hal had watched his skin peel away. 

The air stung at his own leg, the flesh raw and red and bloody. He hadn’t thought about that man in years. Eventually all the voices blended together in his head. 

Hal shrugged. “A bandage and some time, it’ll be fine. Everything heals.” He huffed. “Look, I told you, I just need a lift. You can drop me off at a hospital somewhere and I’ll see you at the next League meeting.” 

Bruce looked at him. “You’re at serious risk for infection,” he said, in that toneless way he had that made Hal want to hit him. 

“What,” he said. “You think you’re the only one who can deal with shit?” 

Bruce didn’t look away, even as Hal spat the words at him. Another of his infuriating pauses, like time bowed before him and didn’t move until he looked at his watch and said that it could. “A deal,” he said. “If you can walk to the Javelin by yourself, then I will give you a lift,and you can deal with it as you see fit.” 

Hal didn’t react as he looked toward the plane, judging the distance. He shifted on his leg again and inhaled sharply at the searing pain. 

He looked back at Batman. 

“That’s fine,” he said. “I can do it.” 

He steeled himself, smiled tersely at Batman, and walked. 

\--

When Hal woke up, he was strapped down and Batman was watching him, which wasn't unusual, but still. Can you say creepy?

His mouth was a grim flat line beneath the impassive cowl, and Hal once again daydreamed about hitting him again just to see him react to something, anything. Hal tugged at his wrists. 

“You struggled,” Bruce said, and didn’t elaborate until Hal made a face at him. 

“Do you know how creepy that sounds?” he asked. 

Bruce’s flat mouth became flatter still. “You struggled when I was working to stop you from bleeding to death.”

Hal had seen Batman do a lot but he had never known him to restrain a colleague for fun, so he tried to believe that this wasn’t a bizarre kidnapping. 

“And I got here… how?” he asked. He remembered the Javelin, and the distance. The pain in his leg. The ache in his chest. 

“You passed out,” Bruce said. 

Hal considered the strength of the restraints and how far he was from the airlock, but even through the haze of pain he could see how it would go: he would make an attempt at throwing himself off the damn plane, Batman would catch him, Batman would tie him down again, and then he’d probably be dumped at an institution rather than a street corner. But still: he would rather take another fall into a ravine than consider a world where Batman would tie him down to, apparently, bandage his wounds while interrogating him.

Bruce pressed down on his ribs a very little as he finished tending to them and Hal felt the blood drain from his face. 

“Hold still,” Bruce said quietly. The pressure on his ribs eased, but as Bruce lifted more supplies into Hal’s line of sight, he knew they had barely just begun. A low groan at the sight of the box, and Bruce looked at him. 

"Don’t look at me like that,” Hal rasped. He couldn’t see Bruce’s eyes but—there was a feeling. A sick feeling in the pit of his stomach when he looked in Hal’s direction. “Look, I know, okay.”

Bruce said nothing. His hand on Hal’s ragged skin was gentle, even as the antiseptic was ten thousand needles into his skin and soul. Hal turned his face away. His head was weightless and lovely, but the rest of his body heavy. He was being dragged down, held down. 

“It was my own fault, I know,” he said to himself. Bruce didn’t exist in this space, just himself and the thousands of people who followed him everywhere he went. “I was stupid and careless and I didn’t try hard enough to stop him. My own stupid fault.” 

Bruce’s hand stilled for a second, just a split second of hesitation, before he went back to cleaning the remains of Hal’s leg. 

Hal’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper as he continued to confess to himself—he couldn’t imagine a future in which Bruce would allow a crazy fuck up who nearly killed himself remain on the Justice League. Nobody would risk the team like that. Civilians like that. His words slurred together and his head was so foggy, like he hadn’t slept in days, like—oh. 

Like someone had given him medication. 

His body was heavy but. His leg didn’t hurt as much. His ribs were numb. 

He’d told Bruce he’d be fine. 

His mouth continued to move, like someone else had taken it over. It had declared independence from him and his rampant idiocy and really, could he blame it?

“And you know, I never even wanted to go to war,” he said into the silence, his words the shadow of a whisper. “I just wanted to fly and I—I just wanted to fly, but now there’s all these dreams that won’t leave me alone and it was my fault.”

“Hal,” Bruce said, because he still existed in this space. Idly Hal wondered how there was space, with all of Coast City next to him.

“I’m sorry," he mumbled to the universe but it didn’t reply. There was a hand wrapped around his ankle. He wriggled against it. 

"Hal, you need to stop moving," Bruce said, but all Hal could manage was a confused noise. 

The hand around his ankle didn’t let go. It was like iron and he was—he was something that wasn’t. "You're alright," came Bruce’s voice. 

“Yeah….” he said slowly, blinking. He turned his head so that he could see all of the ship, shiny and clean. Bruce was there. His voice had sounded so much further away. His hair was messy, and there were lines on his face. His hair looked soft and Hal wanted to touch it. Nothing about Batman ever looked fluffy.

"Yeah,” he said again. His eyes were so heavy. He wanted to close them but—bad things happened when he closed his eyes. He remembered that. There was a feeling in him. Weird and twisty and unpleasant. He blinked. “I’m fine,” he said to Bruce’s fluffy hair. “You can drop me off anytime. Close to a hospital's fine, I can walk it. We're good."

Bruce hummed at him, thoughtfully. “Interesting,” he said. “You seem to currently be speaking another language. None of the words you just said made any sort of sense." There was a moment of nothing that could have been an eternity before Bruce reached out, and rested a hand on Hal’s head, petting it gently. “Go to sleep, Hal.”

\-- 

“This doesn’t look like a hospital,” he said to himself when he could open his eyes again. The cave wasn’t as dark and miserable as he’d suspected for so long, but it wasn’t the white sterile space he’d asked for. He thought he’d asked for it, at least. 

He twisted and tried to stand, but a hand pressed down on his shoulder. 

“Not yet,” Bruce said. 

The instinctive _Fuck you_ rose up and came to a sharp stop behind Hal’s teeth. At Batman’s mercy in Batman’s cave probably wasn’t the best time to pick a fight. He waited a second until he could be sure it wouldn’t slip out. “What,” he joked. “Am I a hostage?” 

Bruce stared down at him. “No,” he said mildly. “You’re someone who won’t be able to walk for a week if you want to keep your leg.” 

Did people really need two legs? Green Lanterns could probably just maintain a construct. He could live with it. One leg and sweet escape from the Batcave and the impending days-long lecture on how irresponsible he was, how careless, how unsuitable for the League and Lanterns both. Hal started to compose it in his own head, to compare it to what Bruce would come out with later. He’d heard a lot of these lectures. 

There were only so many ways a person could say _“You’re a disappointment”_ before they started to repeat previous speeches, and here he was, a captive audience for whatever presentation Batman probably had pre-prepared. 

“I’m sure I’ll live,” Hal said, pushing himself up. 

“You would live,” Bruce agreed, but his head tilted slightly as he observed Hal’s struggle. “Would you fly again?” 

Hal froze. “What?” 

“All you wanted to do was fly,” Bruce said, expressionless. “I can’t imagine Ferris Air would be thrilled to have a one-legged pilot.” 

“I was fucking drugged and you—” _you fucking drugged me, you drugged me and now you think you can tell me what to do? Use it against me? Of course you do. Fuck you. Fuck you_. But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t dig the words out of the target in his chest and let the man see where the bullseye was.

“Lie down, Hal,” Bruce said.

Hal’s hand curled into a fist. He pressed the knuckles into the sheets and breathed deep. “You’re an asshole,” he said clearly. His chest ached at the thought of a future with no sky. His leg ached as he pulled it back onto the bed. 

They looked at each other as Hal settled resentfully back into the pillows. 

“You need to drink your water,” Bruce said, nodding at the table. “You're dehydrated."

But when Hal reached for the glass near him, the cold was shocking against his hot skin, and the tremor in his hand stopped him before he lifted it—that useless fucking tremor, again. Something hot squirmed its way into his chest, and he twisted his hand into the sheets. He didn’t look at Bruce but he could feel the eyes on him. On his hand. 

He tried again when Bruce left the room, but all he did was spill the water over himself and the bed, and he closed his eyes and leaned his head back as he remembered how he used to fly jets. His hand shook and he couldn’t still it. 

He used to fly jets. 

\--

They moved him into a guest room, where he could watch terrible television and rich people wallpaper to his heart’s content. There was a movie on, but he didn’t know what it was. He couldn’t focus on it, head split open and stomach crawling its way up his throat every time he moved. 

There was a series of bangs from down the hall, and someone drove an axe into his head. But there was a hand, warm and rough pressing tablets into his hand and then a water bottle. 

There were more than a few good things about being held prisoner at Wayne Manor, but Hal had decided that not even torture would reveal them. In the privacy of his mind, however, he would freely admit that having Batman wait on him was a definite silver lining to the injuries.

They spent several days like this: Bruce sitting next to him on the bed, a book in hand as the television droned in the background, bad movies on Netflix and good movies from the family’s collection. Sometimes Hal would fall asleep, and dead to the world would roll a little closer until he felt the heat of another person and could settle. 

Time didn’t exist in the room, the curtains pulled and the light dim. But he thought it had been a few days, so after a few days of this, he woke to the weight of Bruce’s arm around him, murmuring nonsense and reading passages of his book to him. He knew when Hal woke. Of course he did. But he said nothing, and didn’t stop, even as Hal shook. His hand was steady and dry against Hal’s clammy neck.

Hal kept his eyes closed and when he moved away from Bruce, he didn’t look at him, eyes fixed on any other point in the room.

“I’m fine,” he said. He looked straight up at the ceiling, where there was no bland judgemental face watching him, except he could see Bruce in the corner of his eye as he got closer, so he closed his eyes again instead.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, and he didn’t pay attention to anything but his breathing until his hands started to tremble, a small constant shudder.

Bruce was sitting next to his bed, a slim pair of glasses resting on his nose as he read his book in silence.

Hal could wait him out. It wasn’t a big deal. He could be just as stubborn as Bruce. 

Bruce was reading as Hal kept staring at the ceiling, and that awful shudder he tried to suppress started up in him again, but he knew how to fix it. He knew how to stop it. He’d been dealing with this before, and it was _fine_ , he didn’t need someone to sit next to him and hold him and he didn’t need Bruce Wayne’s pity.

But all Bruce did was shift that book to one hand, and rest the other on Hal’s head, as gentle as he had been in the plane, and that light touch working its way over his head held him as he wanted to throw himself from the bed. 

Another time and Hal might have rolled his way out of Bruce’s reach, but a glance showed that Bruce wasn’t even looking at him and if neither of them acknowledged it, did it really happen? So, Hal didn’t move. Shivers wracked his body, and cold sweats soaked through his clothes but Bruce didn’t move his hand until Hal rolled over and vomited into the bin next to the bed. The hand moved to his back, soothing circles before it moved again.

Bruce pressed a plastic bottle into his hands, filled with clear water, and Hal drank deeply from it. There was another bottle sitting on the bedside table. 

“It’s okay,” he said, voice hoarse from retching. “I don’t need help. I’m okay.”

“I know,” Bruce said, eyes back on his book. 

Hal moved back, lying on the bed. Slowly he shuffled until they were within touching distance. He closed his eyes, and there was a hand on his hair again. 

“And… and if I wasn’t okay,” he said to the room. He didn’t have an end to the sentence. He couldn’t say it to himself. 

The hand on his head didn’t stop moving. “Then that would also be fine,” Bruce said. 

There was another long moment of silence. Bruce was very good at those. But Hal broke it to quietly ask, “What are you reading, anyway?” and there was a smile in Bruce’s voice as he started to read aloud.


End file.
